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Character Descriptions That Matter

How much detail to give a character's description is often hotly debated, with two primary schools of thought: 1. Include as much detail as possible about each character in order to let the reader know what the character looks like and also to provide additional imagery. It's good to include all five senses in your descriptions. 2. Only include what is absolutely necessary in order to move the story forward. Assume readers will fill in other details with their own imaginations. Descriptions should be built into the story and not just a date dump - e.g., a whole narrative paragraph describing a character but with no context. Bestselling author Barry Eisler is a great technical writer, but he sometimes uses a little more description than I like (completely a personal preference; to most people, his writing probably seems pretty streamlined). The following are some search results for the word 'hair' in his book Detachment in which that is definitely not the
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My Original Stuff

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OK, it's  all  my original stuff when you visit here. But as they say, some  stories are more  original than others (nobody actually says that). Rather than one of my typical rants, screeds, or whiny complaints, however, this piece is a (relatively) serious short story I wrote for a writing contest on Vocal ( Ship of Dreams ): Sorry, it's been a while since I posted. I swear I'll be better from now on.  That is all. I hope you check it out and maybe even like it:  COLD STORAGE (Note: The theme of the contest is the Titanic. But don't worry; it's not a love story, and none of the protagonists are named Rose. I believe there is a contest entry that goes down that rabbit hole, though, if you're interested.)
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One Way or Another (and a Tip for Remembering the Difference)

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I mostly don't observe the difference between these two usages in everyday editing except when only two people or things are involved, although for formal writing or when someone requests that I stick to strict rules of standard written English, I revise accordingly: Use each other to refer to two people or things—e.g., "Edie and Bill didn't care about each other." Use one another to refer to more than two people or things—e.g., "The people of the village cared about one another." Why don't I care so much about the difference? For starters, most people reading or listening to the phrase will be able to determine the meaning from context, with each other being the predominant phrasing used by most speakers of American English (and probably UK English as well, but that's a guess). The second reason is because the distinction is tenuous in many cases anyway; to wit, in our second example, do the people in the village care about one another
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